People gather in the Nvidia booth at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show, in Barcelona on Feb. 27. (Photo: Manu Fernandez, AP) Chip maker Nvidia reports quarterly results after the bell Thursday. Meanwhile, Amazon's popular Echo speaker might have competition soon. The company will report first quarter earnings after the markets close. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, Nvidia is projected to report earnings of 41 cents a share on revenue of 1.26 billion. Google is reportedly working on a project called Chirp that could directly compete with the Amazon Echo voice-enabled speaker.

Meet Jill Watson, a first-time teaching assistant at Georgia Tech assigned to moderate an online forum for a computer science class. Jill was 1 of 9 TAs assigned to help answer questions about coursework and projects from the 300 students enrolled in the advanced course. During the first few weeks in January, Jill really struggled. This was Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, after all, a course with the goal to "build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." It was also a requirement for graduate students to earn their master's degree.

According to The Information, one of the last remaining members of Siri's original team, Darren Haas, has quit Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) for General Electric (GE). His move comes only a few weeks after Steve D'Aurora resigned from his position at Apple to join GE. Both of the former Apple employees are reportedly working on a similar cloud service platform at GE. The primary reason behind the departures seems to be the political infighting within Apple's engineering team. These clashes ensued after the tech giant decided to extend the software platform built by Siri's team, to its other Internet services such as iTunes and iCloud.

Despite originally debuting as a simplistic walkie-talkie-styled app, Roger aspires to deliver more than voice messaging. It's poised to offer the Alexa Voice Service to mobile users regardless if they own an Amazon Echo or Alexa-enabled device. This means you'll be able to, organize your calendar, control gadgets in your smart home, and perform a whole host of other Alexa-initiated actions simply by using Roger. While Alexa is the most impressive name when talking third-party apps here, Dropbox and Slack support is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you consider how many messages or notes can pass through either service in a daily basis. As far as functionality goes, you can even use Roger at present to redirect missed phone calls into the app to create "voice conversations."

Chances are the entity managing your favorite smartphone app or Internet service isn't a person. Algorithms are setting the price of your airline ticket and hailing your Uber driver. And we're only at the beginning of a transition that is going to make the algorithms behind the software people interact with better able to understand and react to humans, technologists at a gathering of Seattle's burgeoning artificial-intelligence industry said Wednesday. "Every application that is going to get built, starting today and into the future, is going to be an intelligent app," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, a venture partner with Madrona Venture Group and a former Microsoft executive. The event, hosted by Somasegar's Seattle-based venture-capital firm, was held to highlight the cluster of companies in the region working on the cutting edge of intelligent software, including in the discipline dubbed machine learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is something of a buzz-phrase across the tech industry these days - but Microsoft's Dave Coplin says that it will come to have a profound impact on society as we know it. In his words, AI "will change everything". Coplin, the company's chief envisioning officer in the UK, was speaking a few days ago at an AI conference in London, where he described it as "the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today." "This technology will change how we relate to technology," he said. "It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human."

Machine learning, a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building, is at the top of the "hype curve" for emerging technologies and is one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016, according to Gartner. It's safe to say that most of us are already interacting with machine learning applications on a daily basis whether it's Apple's Siri, Facebook's face detection, Netflix personalized recommendations, or iOS's autocorrect. And from a business perspective, basically any organization that gathers data with the intention of acting on it can benefit from machine learning. But what can we learn from this growing trend? What can we do with such a widely applicable technology and how can we maximize its potential?

With the creators of Siri offering up a new personal assistant that won't just tell you what pizza is but can order one for you, artificial intelligence is showing a huge leap forward. Viv is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the creators of the AI behind Apple's Siri, the most well-known digital assistant in the world.

Interestingly, Nest (now a part of the same company) shied away from the idea of an Echo like device, citing privacy concerns about talking to Google, its search engine, algorithms and other internet magicks. Recode's sources suggest voice search and intelligent responses from your Google devices will be the centerpiece of Google's showcase, alongside virtual reality developments. Show us what you've got.

Artificial intelligence is already powering your Google searches, your Netflix recommendations, and your smartphone's virtual assistant. It is playing humans at complex, intuitive games like Go, and it is beating them. Now, researchers say, they want AI to power your doctor's diagnoses, your drug prescriptions, and your smartphone's virtual psychologist. They want AI to perform tasks that radiologists do, and at least match them. Machine learning has made tremendous strides in the last decade, becoming one of the fastest-growing, most-hyped areas of computer science.